In providing cellular telephone services, telecommunications providers are always interested in providing feature-rich, high-quality service using the least cost network deployment. Accordingly, there is a desire to constantly develop and deploy improved transmission technologies. Such technologies may include new transmission protocols, frequencies and/or features which often times need to be deployed across expansive geographic regions of the world.
Improving transmission technology can translate into changing the coverage radius of existing wireless transmission sites. The coverage radius of a given transmission site can even decrease after the deployment of the new technology, thereby creating coverage gaps within the communications network. For example, the adoption of a new network feature may result in a corresponding decrease in transmission range. Similarly, increasing the transmission frequency to provide higher bandwidth can result in lower transmission ranges.
Accordingly, there is a realization that some technological modifications to communication networks will result in a corresponding need to add additional transmission sites so as to maintain at least the same level of coverage. The problem presented is one of selection. Namely, the process of selecting where such new sites will be needed is currently a labour-intensive one, in which technicians engage in the manual process of essentially “eyeballing” locations that may experience a coverage gap. When the geographic area involved in this process spans cities and even counties, it can be a daunting process. As such, there is a need in the art for improving and even automating the process of selecting locations for new wireless transmission sites.